HONORÉ DE BALZAC QUOTES X

French novelist and playwright (1799-1850)

Thieves, spies, lovers, diplomats, and slaves of any kind alone know the resources and comforts of a glance. They alone know what it contains of meaning, sweetness, thought, anger, villainy, displayed by the modification of that ray of light which conveys the soul.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

A Daughter of Eve

Tags: anger


Excess of joy is harder to bear than any amount of sorrow.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Letters of Two Brides

Tags: joy


It is so natural, socially speaking, to laugh at the failings of others that we ought to forgive the ridicule our own absurdities excite, and be annoyed only by calumny.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Vicar of Tours


Physical love is a craving like hunger, excepting that man eats all the time, and in love his appetite is neither so persistent nor so regular as at the table. A piece of bread and a carafe of water will satisfy the hunger of any man; but our civilization has brought to light the science of gastronomy. Love has its piece of bread, but it has also its science of loving, that science which we call coquetry, a delightful word which the French alone possess, for that science originated in this country.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: science


The caresses over which love presides are always pure.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


The paternity of M. de Marsay was naturally most incomplete. In the natural order, it is but for a few fleeting instants that children have a father, and M. de Marsay imitated nature.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Girl with the Golden Eyes

Tags: children


There are husbands, tall and of superior intellect, whose wives have lovers who are ugly, short, or stupid.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: lovers


Time is their tyrant: it fails them, it escapes them; they can neither expand it nor cut it short.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

The Girl with the Golden Eyes


To sum up, the world is mine without effort of mine, and the world has not the slightest hold on me.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Gobseck

Tags: effort


Wisdom is the understanding of celestial things to which the Spirit is brought by Love.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Seraphita

Tags: love


Women are always true, even in the midst of their greatest falsities, because they are always influenced by some natural feeling.

HONORE DE BALZAC

Père Goriot

Tags: women


Man is the minister of Nature, and society engrafts itself upon her.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: nature


Oh! after ten years of marriage to find under his roof, and to see all the time, a young girl of from sixteen to eighteen, fresh, dressed with taste, the treasures of whose beauty seem to breathe defiance, whose frank bearing is irresistibly attractive, whose downcast eyes seem to fear you, whose timid glance tempts you, and for whom the conjugal bed has no secrets, for she is at once a virgin and an experienced woman! How can a man remain cold, like St. Anthony, before such powerful sorcery, and have the courage to remain faithful to the good principles represented by a scornful wife, whose face is always stern, whose manners are always snappish, and who frequently refuses to be caressed? What husband is stoical enough to resist such fires, such frosts? There, where you see a new harvest of pleasure, the young innocent sees an income, and your wife her liberty. It is a little family compact, which is signed in the interest of good will.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: beauty


Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.

HONORE DE BALZAC

attributed, Words of Wisdom: Honore de Balzac

Tags: solitude


Two persons are married. The myrmidons of the Minotaur, young and old, have usually the politeness to leave the bride and bridegroom entirely to themselves at first. They look upon the husband as an artisan, whose business it is to trim, polish, cut into facets and mount the diamond, which is to pass from hand to hand in order to be admired all around. Moreover, the aspect of a young married couple much taken with each other always rejoices the heart of those among the celibates who are known as roues; they take good care not to disturb the excitement by which society is to be profited; they also know that heavy showers to not last long. They therefore keep quiet; they watch, and wait, with incredible vigilance, for the moment when bride and groom begin to weary of the seventh heaven.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: business


Women understand better than we do the art of analyzing the two human feelings, which alternately form their weapons of attack, or the weapons of which they are victims. They have the instinct of love, because it is their whole life, and of jealousy, because it is almost the only means by which they can control us.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: art


Your young wife will never take a lover, as we have elsewhere said, without making serious reflections. As soon as the honeymoon wanes, you will find that you have aroused in her a sentiment of pleasure which you have not satisfied; you have opened to her the book of life; and she has derived an excellent idea from the prosaic dullness which distinguishes your complacent love, of the poetry which is the natural result when souls and pleasures are in accord. Like a timid bird, just startled by the report of a gun which has ceased, she puts her head out of her nest, looks round her, and sees the world; and knowing the word of a charade which you have played, she feels instinctively the void which exists in your languishing passion. She divines that it is only with a lover that she can regain the delightful exercise of her free will in love. You have dried the green wood in preparation for a fire.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: love


A man loves with more or less passion according to the number of cords which his pretty mistress binds to his heart.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: passion


Before taking up the subject of modesty, it may perhaps be necessary to inquire whether there is such a thing. Is it anything in a woman but well understood coquetry?

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: modesty


Certain women of a lymphatic temperament will pretend to have the spleen and will even feign death, if they can only gain thereby the benefit of a secret divorce.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Physiology of Marriage

Tags: death